A web editing tool has to understand the contents of the page. It has to understand what parts of the page should be editable, and how they connect together. If there is a list of news for instance, the tool needs to understand it enough to enable users to add new news items. The easy way of accomplishing this is to add some semantic annotations to the HTML pages. These annotations could be handled via Microformats, HTML5 microdata, but the most power lies with RDFa.

RDFa is a way to describe the meaning of particular HTML elements using simple attributes. For example:

Having contents of a page described via RDFa makes it very easy to extract the content model into JavaScript. We can have a common utility library for doing this, but we also should have a common way of keeping track of these content objects. Enter Backbone.js:

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

With Backbone, the content extracted from the RDFa-annotated HTML page is easily manageable via JavaScript. Consider for example:

This JS would work across all the different CMS implementations. Backbone.js provides a quite nice RESTful implementation of communicating with the server with JSON, but it can be easily overridden with CMS-specific implementation by just implementing a new Backbone.sync method.